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Nice! I was so ticked that it decided to storm tonight in Boulder for the hour surrounding the time I was going to try to photograph the moon, but there’s no way I could’ve gotten something like that! Phil – I don’t suppose you have connections that can get anyone up to the ISS to try a shot like that?

@ ^ Bigfoot : Only from certain relatively very near parts of space! 😉

If you travel further out than maybe (?Guesstimating here?) about halfway between Jupiter and Saturn (7 AU perhaps?) the Moon and Earth will blur together into a single spot of light just as the twin stars of Alpha Centauri do! Even before you get to Proxima Centauri (4.2 light years) even the combined earth-and-moonlight speck will fade from unaided eyesight visibility.

From beyond about 50 light years radius our Sun* ceases to be visible without optical assistence. A 50 ly radius is a tiny grain of sand on the cosmic sandpit that is our Milky Way Galaxy. Our Milky Way in turn is but the most minute speck in the wider universe.

This image was taken on the very boundaries of space hovering over the gravity well of Earth – and it is one superluminously splendid image.

Seconding your thanks to the BA for this.

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* our Sun’s absolute magnitude 4.82 ie. at 33 light years that’s how bright it’d be. The sharpest human eyes in good dark conditions can see down to mag. six or so I gather. Staggeringly enough our Sun is actually in the top 5% of brightest stars with most stars being red dwarfs, orange dwarfs and white dwarfs.

But our Sun could be (barely) imaged from the Andromeda galaxy (M31) if astronomers had a Hubble Space Telescope at their disposal. But they would have no reason to consider it special among the billions of other stars they could see in our galaxy.